Lee.org

This is exactly what IOS4 did to my 3G iPhone, no exaggeration.

local version:

I called Apple again today to try and resolve this problem. I was on hold for 13 minutes. “Ryan” came on and the call quality immediately went to crap. The call failed after a few seconds. I’ll call back later after my phone rage has subsided.

It is rage because I got this phone because it “just works”. But last week Steve Jobs broke my phone and the best answer I’ve gotten so far is “Well, it was an optional update so we won’t support it.” (yes, exact words). Me along with a million other people got your fucking^W update. I paid to live in a walled garden and now the gardeners are telling me in no unambiguous terms that it is their right to burn down the garden and make me buy another one. The evil Droid phone is starting to look pretty good.

I just got off the phone with Apple support who said, “You installed the 4.0.1 upgrade for your iPhone 3G? Ha! Sucker! You are so screwed and there is no unscrewing that pooch!”

After the upgrade, my iPhone does everything much slower. The rep told me, “yes, it’s much slower… It was an optional update so we’re not responsible… If you try to downgrade, you’ll brick your phone.” I embellished that first quote but the second one is pretty much word for word.

If you have an iPhone 3G like me, DO NOT get the 4.0 update. It offers no improvements, only a huge performance hit. For example, it now take 8-14 seconds to start my calendar app, making it MUCH less useful than the previous 4 second startup time.

I will call Apple a few more times and if it keeps looking like Apple really has pulled the trigger on a planned obsolescence program for this 1.5 year old device, I will dump Apple for another platform. Eff you right back Steve Jobs.

On my flight from San Francisco to India and back in February, I had a LOT of time to watch movies. And it did.

Gi Joe: Rise of Cobra – splosions! Lots of splosions!

The Invention of Lying – a totally awesome and fun one trick pony

Astro Boy – awful

Love Happens – I really enjoyed it! A bit disjointed but I saw through that

All About Steve – a mistake. Poor plot, direction, script. 25 minutes was wayyy enough of that

Imagine That – 30 seconds strongly suggested that it was a bad “hilarity ensues” movie

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs – slapstick comedy for the 5-12 set. Not for grown ups.

Management – I gave it 15 minutes. Feh, it’s another blandly plotted Jennifer aniston movie

District 9 – wholely incomplete :-(. Unhappily amoral. Filled with dumb humans and aliens, pretty much too dumb to be believable.

Terminator Salvation – the first 15 minutes demonstrated poor storytelling. 20 minutes in, they gave a magic skynet shutdown code to only O’Connor, wha??? It’s a total retread but it has enough explosions to make up for it

I subbed for a class in Physical Computing at San Francisco State University for Michael Shiloh for a few weeks. Michael came back to teach the class again and…

wanted you to know that today in class they said wonderful things about you, that you are a great teacher and were extremely helpful in moving their projects forward.

thanks for doing such a great job!

:-)

Went to the Switchboard Music Festival last weekend. Super fun!
My favorites include:

Strike Gently, Kate Campbell and Regina Schaffer playing solo piano pieces

Teslim – not entirely my style of music but they can really play!

Sabbaticus Rex – with their animus connections to their musical instruments.

Zoe Keating – She’s becoming one of my musical heros. :-)

Billygoat – They played this awesome psychedelic set with accompanying visuals :-)

It was just 2 blocks away at Dance Mission Theater which was super-nice. And I got to chat with (a pregnant!) Zoe Keating for a few minutes about music and licensing for a few minutes which was terrific.

————————————————–

Here’s snippets from the Switchboard press kit

Teslim means both ‘commit’ and ‘surrender’ in Turkish and features two well known Bay Area
musicians: violinist Kaila Flexer and Gari Hegedus on oud, Turkish saz, Greek lauoto and other
(mostly plucked) stringed instruments. This potent duo performs Greek, Turkish and Sephardic
music. In addition, both Flexer and Hegedus are composers whose original music is based on
these fertile traditions. This unusual duo is at home in classical, early music, and folk music
venues and holds workshops on a variety of topics.

Sabbaticus Rex is an ensemble rooted in the supremacy of sound over music, the triumph of
tone over time and thought. This process uses haunting and beautiful acoustic instruments and
methods: overtone gongs, shakuhachi (bamboo Zen flutes), Taimu (bass) shakuhachi, and throatsinging.
This is sound, but not music. It is primordial easy-listening for dinosaurs: slowly shifting
elemental dialogues between fat flutes and big gongs.

David Klein and Nick Woolley formed the musical/visual duo of Billygoat, producing stopanimated
films and performing their live, original scores. These films have been described as
“stop-motion shorts of staggering complexity,” created one tiny movement at a time via tens of
thousands of individual photographs of an ever-morphing art piece.

There is an exceptional article in Equire Magazine about Roger Ebert. (via)

Tomato is a small, lean and simple replacement firmware for the Linksys WRT54G.

The Tomato Router Firmware works beautifully. With the TCP Vegas and QoS settings, I can have several users on my network including torrents and web surfers and still have the best Skype call quality I’ve ever had, all with the same DSL connection I’ve had for years. The interface is fabulously clean and functional. I can see who is on the network and get a good feel for what is happening at a glance. I’ve been running the software for almost a year now and, plain and simple, it works great.

I just donated $20 to the project.

I am currently running Tomato version 1.25 on a Linksys / Cisco WRT54GL. (yes, v 1.27 is currently available)

Here is a review my friend Marcus wrote of his experience seeing the metal band Anvil in concert in San Francisco. I found it greatly uplifting!

Lance wrote:
> how was it?
>
I had a lot of fun. Another one down in my quest for unique experiences. :-)

The audience at the Fillmore was really mixed, ranging in age from 13 to 70. Some were young (some parents brought kids), some older (standard SF fare) and some people looked like they could have been to concerts when Anvil started out. (The band has been around for 33 years…)

It definitely was very loud, but I expected that and it was fine with ear plugs. The opening band was Attitude Adjustment, which is pretty much hardcore thrash metal with yelled lyrics, which is not my preferred musical choice for most listening occasions. But, also interesting because it was a new experience for me to see live.

Anvil played music that was good solid 80s heavy metal, some a bit towards speed metal. Overall not bad at all, although a bit hard to hear with the volume. The song titles could all have been taken directly from Spinal Tap: Metal to Metal, Forged in Fire, Thumb Hang, Jackhammer, Mad Dog, Mothra (!) etc. Very entertaining, I loved it. I don’t think they were really #1 hit contenders, although in the 80s everything would have been possible The guitar and drums playing was quite good. But the show made it. The guys just looked like they had a blast, running around, rocking out, and just having fun. At one point the guy actually took out this shiny gold dildo and played guitar with it. Hilarious.
Varying the vibration speed to change the sound on the pickups, which actually worked, and much better than I expected. (Lips, the front guy, later after the show kind of conceded that Spinal Tap is the fake Anvil…)

The guys were great. They gave an energetic show, and had all this fun and optimism. Totally like previous underdogs who valued their newfound movie-driven popularity, tremendously appreciated the audience, and enjoyed every minute of performing. And Lips said “This is what I love doing. You’re giving my the time of my life. I appreciate you guys so much, that after the show, I’m coming out there, and won’t leave until I’ve met each and every one of you.” And he did. Took over an hour to see the over hundred people who stuck around, he signed everything, and he hung around and actually really talked to people for a bit – he’s pretty funny – and he grinned for every single picture they took. (I neglected to take my camera – bummer). Great guy.

I definitely want to see the Anvil movie now. Let me know when it arrives in your queue.

— Marc

My call to Omnipage Sales…

Short form:
Their sales website is huge and very pretty. They spent a lot of money on it. Omnipage 17 costs about $150, Omnipage 17 Professional costs about $500. And there’s the “Enterprise” version.

I clicked the pretty “chat with a representative” popup on their site to find out what’s up with the extra $350.

Want to know what you are paying for? Salesmanship.

—————————————

Here’s the transcript. My commentary (not from the conversation) is in bold

—–

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you…
Hello, welcome to Nuance Chat. Please briefly describe your goal or question and I will connect you with the best resource to meet your objectives.
Customer: What is the difference between Omnipage 17 and 17 Pro? Can you show me a comparison page?
Erin Sim: That’s a good question. What I can do is transfer you to a sales agent who can answer that question and ensure you are getting the correct product. Would that be helpful?
Customer: sure That’s odd, I didn’t make it directly to sales? Whatever…
Erin Sim: Great! Before I transfer you can you please provide me with your name and phone number?
Customer: I’d rather not, thanks. Why would this guy need my phone number? Followup sales call?
Erin Sim: No problem, I will transfer you now. Your expected wait time is 5-10 minutes as we are currently experiencing higher volumes than usual. Thank you for your patience.
Johannes Wehrmann has entered the session.
Erin Sim has left the session.
Johannes Wehrmann: Hello, welcome to Nuance sales support, please let me review what you have entered.
Customer: Hi, What is the difference between Omnipage 17 and 17 Pro? Can you show me a comparison page?
Johannes Wehrmann: There isn’t a comparison between Standard and Pro.
Customer: There is a $350 price difference. You spent $100,000 on your fricking Omnipage website and there’s no way to compare your products? WTF?
Johannes Wehrmann: I can discuss your requirements with you and explaing the differences.
Johannes Wehrmann: Would you like me to call you? … and fill my head with OCR sugarplums?
Customer: I want OCR that works. You sell a product, I buy it. It works. I want to convert image PDFs into Docs. Not hard. I don’t want to be put into the sales funnel. Thanks. Bye. Ok, maybe I’m a bit punchy. But how many people’s pocketbooks did they slime their way into? I have no respect for this kind of sales.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

Here’s my review I posted to Yelp. Charlotte, Riley and I went there last night. Kern was buying as our holiday present.

1550Hyde
2 1/2 of 5 stars. It was “fine”.

My yellowtail was cooked fine with a bit of bitter green sauce on it. The cooked baby green things beside it were nice if a little bitter. My friend’s salad was entirely arugula (which as we know is rather bitter) with some oil & vinegar. The coffee my friend got was rather bitter (though maybe that’s the style for coffee in San Francisco). I appreciate “bitter” as a culinary tool but hey!

The server was very nice. My friend asked for a substitute side-order. The kitchen missed the instruction and the server promptly brought her the side she wanted. The plate of the side was hot but the side was cold on the inside :-( It was this cauliflower thing which was good if a bit… wait for it… bitter.

For desert, the chocolate pudding stuff was really good. As was the banana bread! And the bread set on the table was very good. Though I suppose none of those items were made in-house.

But we had a lot of fun riding the cable cars on the way home!